China - World Leader. ·
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Answered by
Eric Jenott
Jan 15
In thousands of years of its history, China is clearly having its absolutely best years during the past 3 decades. Why so many people, especially Westerners are so convinced they know better even than China & Chinese what China & Chinese should do?
I grew up in and lived in the US for 36 years. My impression was that most Americans I knew thought that they knew enough to argue their point about any topic as long as they’d seen a few news stories about it, or overheard some of their friends or colleagues talking about it, and that anyone else who disagreed with what they thought, especially if what they thought was inline with mainstream American thought, just had to be wrong and needed to be corrected.

There’s something else special about Americans. I’m not sure how to describe it. They sort of tend to subconsciously feel that America is the “real thing”, the standard to aim for, the place where things really matter and the really important decisions are made, the place where everything is “normal”, and that other countries are just some kind of strange, outlying, sub-normal little societies that want to be like the US but lack the means or the intellectural capacity to catch up. They can’t really imagine any other country doing as well as or even beating them in any way they believe matters.

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but its kind of like they see themselves as wise adults and everyone else as children—either good children that need to be taught and nurtured, or bad children that need to be disciplined and brought under control. And just like adults who see themselves as wise and deserving of respect from little children, they are very offended when any other country has the disrespect and audacity to insinuate that it doesn’t need to follow everything about the US’s example, doesn’t need to listen to all its teachings, isn’t going to submit to its control, and that it has its own ways and its own ideas that it thinks are better for itself.

And they’re more than offended, they’re shocked and dismayed, if another country actually does do better than them and starts to surpass them in many ways. They can’t accept this as actual reality. They have to enter a state of denial. It can’t really be true. The numbers must be falsified. The videos must be staged; the Chinese people can’t really be happy, they only say they are because they’re being forced to. It’s all lies and false propaganda. They don’t want it to be true, so they won’t really try to find out the facts and analyze them with intellectual honesty.

I remember as early as elementary school in the US, trying to argue with adults that there was no reason to expect that America was guaranteed to always be the greatest nation on earth. I would point out that throughout history many nations had achieved international preeminence at one point only to decline and become insignificant, so how could they be so certain America wouldn’t eventually suffer the same fate? I was always told that America would forever be the greatest nation on earth and the leader of the world because its constitution and form of government were the best the world had ever seen and there would never be any better. Perhaps it is exactly this overconfidence, and consequent lack of vigilance, that is more fundamentally responsible than anything else for America’s decline.

It’s not all American’s that are this way to the extreme, but it does seem to be an overwhelmingly obvious trend to anyone of a different mindset that spends much time engaging with a broad variety of Americans in conversation about controversial subjects.

It is really sad that so many deceive themselves like this. In many ways most Americans I know (though certainly not all) are really quite good people, but this self-deceit and national narcissism only makes them hold on to outdated views that hurt themselves and prevent them from seeing the real problems that they need to focus on solving, rather than blaming everything on countries like China that they can’t hope to control anymore.